MARTIN LUTHER
NAME: Martin
Luther King Jr.
OCCUPATION: Civil
Rights Activist, Minister
BIRTH DATE:
January 15, 1929
DEATH DATE: April
04, 1968
EDUCATION:
Morehouse College, Crozer Theological Seminary, Boston University
PLACE OF BIRTH:
Atlanta, Georgia
PLACE OF DEATH:
Memphis, Tennessee
ORIGINALLY:
Michael King Jr.
Martin Luther King, Jr. (January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968)
was an American clergyman, activist, and leader in the African-American Civil
Rights Movement. He is best known for his role in the advancement of civil
rights using nonviolent civil disobedience. King has become a national icon in the
history of American progressivism.
A Baptist minister, King became a civil rights activist
early in his career. He led the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott and helped found
the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957, serving as its
first president. With the SCLC, King led an unsuccessful struggle against
segregation in Albany, Georgia, in 1962, and organized nonviolent protests in
Birmingham, Alabama, that attracted national attention following television
news coverage of the brutal police response. King also helped to organize the
1963 March on Washington, where he delivered his "I Have a Dream"
speech. There, he established his reputation as one of the greatest orators in
American history. He also established his reputation as a radical, and became
an object of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's COINTELPRO for the rest of
his life. FBI agents investigated him for possible communist ties, recorded his
extramarital liaisons and reported on them to government officials, and on one
occasion, mailed King a threatening anonymous letter that he interpreted as an
attempt to make him commit suicide.
On October 14, 1964, King received the Nobel Peace Prize for
combating racial inequality through nonviolence. In 1965, he and the SCLC
helped to organize the Selma to Montgomery marches and the following year, he
took the movement north to Chicago. In the final years of his life, King
expanded his focus to include poverty and the Vietnam War, alienating many of
his liberal allies with a 1967 speech titled "Beyond Vietnam". King
was planning a national occupation of Washington, D.C., called the Poor
People's Campaign. King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, in Memphis,
Tennessee. His death was followed by riots in many U.S. cities. Allegations
that James Earl Ray, the man convicted of killing King, had been framed or
acted in concert with government agents persisted for decades after the
shooting, and the jury of a 1999 civil trial found Loyd Jowers to be complicit
in a conspiracy against King.
King was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the
Congressional Gold Medal posthumously. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was
established as a U.S. federal holiday in 1986. Hundreds of streets in the U.S.
have been renamed in his honor. A memorial statue on the National Mall was
opened to the public in 2011.
LEGACY
King's main legacy was to secure progress on civil rights in
the U.S. Just days after King's assassination, Congress passed the Civil Rights
Act of 1968.[219] Title VIII of the Act, commonly known as the Fair Housing
Act, prohibited discrimination in housing and housing-related transactions on
the basis of race, religion, or national origin (later expanded to include sex,
familial status, and disability). This legislation was seen as a tribute to
King's struggle in his final years to combat residential discrimination in the
U.S.
Internationally, King's legacy included influences on the
Black Consciousness Movement and Civil Rights Movement in South Africa. King's
work was cited by and served as an inspiration for South African leader Albert
Lutuli, another black Nobel Peace prize winner who fought for racial justice in
his country. The day following King's assassination, school teacher Jane
Elliott conducted her first "Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes" exercise with her
class of elementary school students in Riceville, Iowa. Her purpose was to help
them understand King's death as it related to racism, something they little
understood from having lived in a predominately white community.
King's wife, Coretta Scott King, followed in her husband's
footsteps and was active in matters of social justice and civil rights until
her death in 2006. The same year that Martin Luther King was assassinated, she
established the King Center in Atlanta, Georgia, dedicated to preserving his
legacy and the work of championing nonviolent conflict resolution and tolerance
worldwide. Their son, Dexter King, currently serves as the center's chairman.
Daughter Yolanda King, who died in 2007, was a motivational speaker, author and
founder of Higher Ground Productions, an organization specializing in diversity
training.
There are opposing views, even within the King family, of
the slain civil rights leader's religious and political views about gay,
lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. King's widow Coretta said publicly
that she believed her husband would have supported gay rights. However, his
daughter Bernice believed he would have been opposed to gay marriage. The King
Center includes discrimination, and lists homophobia as one of its examples, in
its list of "The Triple Evils" that should be opposed.
At the White House Rose Garden on November 2, 1983,
President Ronald Reagan signed a bill creating a federal holiday to honour
King. Observed for the first time on January 20, 1986, it is called Martin
Luther King, Jr. Day. Following President George H. W. Bush's 1992
proclamation, the holiday is observed on the third Monday of January each year,
near the time of King's birthday. On January 17, 2000, for the first time,
Martin Luther King Jr. Day was officially observed in all fifty U.S. states.
Arizona (1992), New Hampshire (1999) and Utah (2000) were the last three states
to recognize the holiday.
QUOTES
·
“Human
salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted”.
·
“Freedom
is never voluntarily given up by the oppressor”.
·
“Nothing
in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious
stupidity”.
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